Thursday, March 06, 2008

ly·can·thro·py /laɪˈkænθrəpi/ –noun1. a delusion in which one imagines oneself to be a wolf or other wild animal.2. the supposed or fabled assumption of the appearance of a wolf by a human being.

Here's a classic from the film student archives. This was done for my "visual effects" course taught by teacher/friend Pete Hartel at Columbia College in Chicago. I think the point of the course was to do more green-screen/animation type stuff, but I was a fan of doing multiple layering opticals at the time so I went with my gut. While this is a very short piece at around 30 seconds, there's a lot of images buried in the mix to evoke a sense of this man's struggle to maintain control over his sanity. Included in this collage is the naked body of Nicole Weisner bathing in slow motion, a close-up of the calico fur of Repugnance the cat, Tor Johnson examining his feces in a toilet (this is run backwards), Scott Greene doing push-ups in the buff, and centrally the backwards "transformation" of werewolf into man. Oh, and then there's the lettering for the word itself, which I charred my dad's garage floor trying to shoot with gasoline and sand (note to self: you're a dumbass). The audio was grabbed from a plastic vinyl insert in a Spiderman comic book which had a scratch in the groove so that it looped the line "I wish I were insane..." ad nauseum. When you hear something like that and it occurs naturally, you know you have something special.